Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Oriental Institute of The University of Chicago is a leader in open access publishing of scholarly work on the Ancient World. In 2009 they published some 114 titles online, many of which are long out of print, rare, and hard to find. These are listed below in the order in which they appeared online, earliest at the top. The Electronic Publications Initiative of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago outlines the forward thinking policies which guide this effort.

OIC 5. Medinet Habu 1924-28. Part 1: The Epigraphic Survey of the Great Temple of Medinet Habu (Seasons 1924-25 To 1927-28). By Harold H. Nelson Part 2: The Architectural Survey of the Great Temple and Palace of Medinet Habu (Season 1927-28). By Uvo Hölscher Originally published in 1929.

Friday, January 22, 2010

DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 15 January 2010—Authenticated scholars and researchers with online access to full-text content in JSTOR can now locate and connect to articles through WorldCat.org.

Over 4.5 million JSTOR article-level records from more than 1,000 journals, selected monographs, and other scholarly content are now indexed in WorldCat.org, the Web destination for discovery of materials in libraries worldwide. JSTOR records are delivered in WorldCat.org search results. Scholars and researchers using WorldCat.org can now identify content in JSTOR and connect to the full-text using the authorization provided by their library.

“JSTOR is invaluable for researchers and scholars around the world,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. “OCLC is honored to partner with JSTOR in this endeavor, which will significantly increase the visibility and availability of these digital resources via the Internet. This is an important advance for the international scholarly community.”

WorldCat.org is a Web destination with search and social networking features that allow information seekers to discover, localize, and personalize content from local collections and those of more than 10,000 WorldCat libraries worldwide. WorldCat.org indexing of JSTOR metadata helps researchers easily identify resources in the collection alongside other materials relevant to their work. An authorization is required for access to full-text materials in JSTOR.

“Users want to access important scholarly content in myriad ways,” said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director. “Millions of WorldCat.org users around the world will now be able to locate the content in JSTOR licensed by their libraries quickly and easily. This is a fantastic development that we believe will serve OCLC member libraries and their communities well.”

WorldCat is the world’s largest database of bibliographic information built continuously by libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work.

There are now more than 165 million records in WorldCat spanning five millennia of recorded knowledge. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Every second, OCLC and its member libraries add seven records to WorldCat.

About JSTOR

JSTOR is a preservation archive and research platform for the academic community. Through JSTOR, faculty, researchers, and students are able to discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over 1,000 academic journals, as well as conference proceedings, monographs, and other scholarly content. More than 6,000 libraries and cultural heritage institutions and hundreds of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly literature participate in and support JSTOR. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to advance scholarship and teaching in sustainable ways. ITHAKA also includes two additional services—Ithaka S+R and Portico.

About OCLC

Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 112 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world’s largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat on the Web.

1) For those of you who read AWOL via the feedburner email function. Feedburner does not always reproduce the headers of each item included in a message, so scrolling to see what might be below the fold is useful.

2) For those of you who read AWOL via newsreader, aggregator, or other social media use of the feed. You can subscribe by email if you wish. Click through to the AWOL url (http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/) and fill in you email address in the form provided in the sidebar there. AWOL by email is delivered once a day, in the early afternoon NY time. 847 email addresses are subscribed at this moment.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Sulieman Alshuhri is a Ph.D student at University of Strathclyde in the department of Computer and information Science. He is conducting research towards the establishment of a digital library of Arabic manuscripts. He is the author of the Arabic Digital Library blog.

In aid of his research he is asking for assistance:

Dear participant,

I am glad to invite you to participate in this questionnaire to discover the needs and requirements of a digital library of Arabic manuscripts of Arabic manuscriptologists and those who have a related interest in this field (e.g. librarians, information specialist).

English online questionnaire is available on one of the following URLs:

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.